PORTRAIT OF A KING 157
prosperous reign, until he bequeathed a not ill-governed kingdom to his adroiter, self-confident, less scrupulous son. It could not fit him to deal with the peculiar problems of his times. It destroyed English monarchy.
One more thing is needed to complete the picture. Charles has been accused of a lack of imagination, and the criticism seems unjust. Humour he certainly lacked, and the balance that goes with humour; he was a Scotsman. But it might be truer to say that he was actually betrayed by an excess of imagination, especially in the days when he rode to Madrid to heal the strifes of Europe or, a few months later, pictured himself as the champion of Protestantism. When hard facts cured him of such dreams, his imagination began to play on a romantic conception of the Church and of himself as its rejuvenator. It is the one dream of King Charles which was and is a reality. If he could have seen modern England (with all its faults) plentifully supplied with churches in which a well-educated clergy worships God in the words of his beloved Prayer Book, more regularly and with greater ceremony than his own age permitted, he would ask indignantly why any one counted him a failure. It is the literary fashion to-day to sneer at the whole institution, and to talk loudly of empty churches without going to see how surprisingly full many of them are. The phase may pass. Meanwhile England has a Church and a ministry and sacraments; the humble can always find what they seek; and if the indifferent should one day turn back to the tradition upon which our whole dvilization rests, they may be glad to find that tradition unbroken and surviving in forms which King Charles consecrated by his life-work and cemented with his blood.